she watched and longed for the “felicisima Armada.” On Saturday the 20th, while the enemy crept up Channel in heavy rain, and the wind fell lighter and lighter, she tacked and tacked her way out painfully through a night of deadly anxiety. She had her reward. On Sunday, “conspicuous with an extravagant pennant and a banner on her mizzen, and fighting almost at grappling distance,” she battered Don Juan Martinez de Recalde in the Santa Anna. Towards evening the Admirals held Council on board her; when night fell her lantern led the fleet, until Drake, finding himself among strange sail, extinguished it and lay by for daylight. Howard and the rest went after the Spanish lights, and when dawn came the Revenge found herself alone,
and drifting within a few cables of the huge Nuestra Señora del Rosario, flagship of Don Pedro de Valdes, Captain-General of the Andalusian Squadron and one of Sidonia’s best officers. The Captain-General was “spoiled of his mast the day before,” and had smashed his bowsprit in collision; but he tried to stand out for conditions of surrender. The Vice-Admiral replied that he was Drake, and had no time to parley. That ended the matter; the galleon went into Dartmouth “under the conduction of the Roebuck” and the Revenge “bare with the Lord Admiral, and recovered his Lordship that night, being Monday.” Aboard of her went poor Don Pedro and forty of his officers; also their cash, to the tune of fifty thousand ducats.
On Tuesday the 23rd, the prisoners, or those of them who were allowed on deck, witnessed the battle off the Isle of Wight, the failure of the galleasses with their countless oars, and the rescue of the Triumph, in which our first Victory and our first Dreadnought distinguished themselves. They saw, too, in the bird-like line-ahead flights of the Revenge and her consorts, their quick concentrations and dispersals, what Mr Julian Corbett has described as “the first dawn of those modern tactics which Blake and Monk were to develop and Nelson to perfect.” By the end of the day they were probably all deaf; the unknown eyewitness who wrote the Relation of Proceedings for Howard, declares that “there was never seen a more terrible value of great shot, nor more hot fight than this was; for although the musketeers
